Cognitive Studies

#cognitivestudies #borganisms

Only the west has /knowledge/ while all other cultures and civilizations only myths and
other suspect beliefs. That division of truth (though one might ask with Stalin: /how
many divisions does truth have/?) is replicated in the disciplinary structure of academia.
The dynamics of western society is the subject of economics, sociology and political
science while the barbarians outside the gate are the subjects of anthropology and
various area studies programs (South Asian Studies, East Asian Studies etc). The gate
is porous - some fortunate barbarians slipped through so they benefit from Gender
studies and Black and Chicano Studies and Native American studies.

That’s why Science Studies comes as such a surprise. Scholars such as Bruno Latour
and John Law turned their ethnographic gaze towards the alpha men of western
scholarship: their scientists, technologists and economists. That encounter produced
some of the most spectacular fireworks of late twentieth century academia, including
claims that facts are socially constructed.
 How is that even possible: isn’t the definition of a fact that it’s out there
rather than being made by us?

Latour has an interesting defense of the construction of facts - he doesn’t use the word
“social” since he doesn’t think it denotes anything substantial (why? because society is
what’s being constructed, not what doing the constructing). He says: why would you
want your facts to be /anything else besides constructed/? Let’s take a fact such as
gravity acts equally on rocks and feathers. Do we observe such facts in the wild? No,
we don’t. It takes a carefully constructed vacuum to produce a situation in which
feathers fall at the same speed as rocks. It takes a lot of labor (notice the use of that
Marxist term) to produce that fact; why would we want to deny the creative forces of the
scientist by attributing facts to a magical and uber-capitalist /nature/? Facts, like bricks,
are made with great care in the laboratory, i.e., the scientific factory.

I am simplifying and mangling his argument, but you get the point: if knowledge is a
commodity produced by a particular laboring class, it’s products (such as facts and
theories) have to be understood analogously to other products of labor. Fair enough, but
I don’t want to stop there. Science studies still accepts that there’s a special kind of
knowledge produced in a special kind of factory. It doesn’t equate a Yanomami
Amazonian’s knowledge of the forest with that of the scientific botanist.

I believe that distinction between high knowledge and low knowledge doesn’t hold
anymore. Not for romantic or political reasons, or because I am a relativist who believes
each culture or person has their own ways of knowing. Instead, the real reason is
because we now live in knowledge societies where we are all producing knowledge all
the time. To take one obvious example, the iconic companies of our time make money
out of (mostly) free knowledge labor on everyone’s part: where would google be without
our searches, facebook without our updates and amazon without our reviews?
Knowledge is simply no longer a specialized form of labor.

Yes, it’s true that the market compensates knowledge labor in lopsided
ways: amazon doesn’t pay me anything for leaving a thoughtful review,
but it pays the designer who designs the interface on which my review
is based really well. There’s a new hierarchy of knowledge, but it’s not
the hierarchy of facts versus myths.

All of this is to say that even the market acknowledges that knowledge no longer lives in
science but in /cognition/, i.e., in the mental, emotional and aesthetic capacities of all
humans, and perhaps a range of nonhumans as well. Those knowledges are
increasingly the target of control, competition and advertising - for example,
mindfulness meditation has become an instrument of productivity. Are we moving into a
phase of capitalist development centered on knowledge or are we in a new condition
altogether, a cyborg existence that goes beyond capital?
 I am thinking the latter, but that hunch is irrelevant to this essay.

Whatever the case may be, we need is a new framework for understanding knowledge
as it’s being produced today , which is cognitive rather than scientific, so science
studies should be replaced by /cognitive studies/. I use the term /cognition/
expansively, to include emotion and aesthetics as well as reason, but even at it’s most
expansive, cognition is limited. /Which is a good thing/. Science is limited too - it’s
importance is precisely due to the fact that it’s a limited perspective that claims universal
applicability. Cognition has a wider angled lens than science. With any luck it has some
applicability too. Let’s see.

Talking about applicability, what phenomena are ripe for cognitive analysis? The map of
the cognitive terrain is yet to be drawn, but let me mention a couple of directions.
Consider the widespread phenomenon of elite disenfranchisement - the widespread
belief amongst white people in the west or upper caste Hindus in India that they are
victims of a massive conspiracy. Where do such beliefs come from? How are they
aggregated and turned into political platforms? What role does technology play in
turning grievance into electoral retribution?

There’s no shortage of scholars investigating these questions; some approach them as

political scientists, others as psychologists and yet others through ethnographic studies.
I believe cognition, broadly construed, is the thread connecting these disparate research
agendas. It’s only through cognitive studies that we can understand how forwarded
rumors on WhatsApp lead to lynchings in India or how democrats rather than
republicans have made Russia into public enemy number one. Most importantly,
cognition is both abstract and concrete, partaking in both the digital and the physical. In
fact, it breaks down the old dualisms between nature and society, between mind and
matter etc. /That too is a good thing/. The central developments of our era - climate
change, automation, ecological collapse, animal rights - arise at the intersection of
information and energy. That’s cognitive territory which can only be explored using
cognitive tools.

You will see some of these tools in action as I discuss the climate of our times in future
essays. Let me correct that statement: cognitive studies will be incorporated into every
newsletter for the foreseeable future; my goal is to say something useful about topics of
wide interest . With that in mind, I am hiving off the technical material - such as the
vatman series - into separate writing projects. Progress on those projects will be
mentioned in this newsletter.

/That’s what I thinking/. You may think differently. Please tell me if you do!